teaching philosophy

Giuliana La Rosa Teaching Assistant of ItalianTeaching philosophy Being a teacher is one of the best jobs you could ever wish to have. Teaching is not easy, even though it looks like the easiest and most natural thing in the world; you may follow your instinct and your personality as well as your skills as a teacher, but I do believe that experience is the only thing which can reveal what is right and what is wrong about your teaching method. You can have many wonderful ideas, but if you don’t try them first, you will never know if they work or not. Experimentation is training, and training is experimentation. You can be very creative and have a natural inclination in teaching, but you need to learn the right timing as well as the right way to put your ideas into practice. Educators have been writing thousands of books about teaching methods, but all of the methods proposed are still discussed, analyzed, criticized, approved or denied, since there’s no official “right” way to teach; it depends on too many factors that are going to affect the result of that specific theoretical method. You cannot learn how to teach through books: just your personal experience, along with those of your colleagues, can really help you to understand what is working and what is not, what you like and what you don’t. Not all teachers are the same, just as not all the students are: age, personality, culture, temperament, subjects taught, these are all factors that may affect the teaching and learning approach. I personally discovered that certain activities work in certain classes, but not in others, and this is why only time and experience really teach you how to approach a subject in different classes. Teaching is also a responsibility towards your students as well as towards yourself. You, as a teacher, have a responsibility to teach what you know in the most productive way possible, revealing the hints, the tricks to obtain the best result in the easiest way; teaching is also a responsibility towards yourself, as your students’ feedback is a “warning signal” about the quality and the effectiveness of your teaching method, so you have to read the signals and learn from them. After this long premise about teaching, in general, I’d like to talk about my specific case as a foreign language teacher. I’m an Italian teacher, and in my 3 years of experience, even though brief, I’ve learned many tips. Teaching Italian means being Italian first of all, being the sponsor of culture, of your homeland, of your language. Italian is not just a language, it is the result of traditions, an ancient culture made of history, art, cuisine, music, dance and then, yes, language. The language is a mirror of a culture, a way to express it from the syntax to the vocabulary used. Some of my students are in love with the culture of Italy, and then, by consequence, with the language Italians speak. This is why I like mixing grammar with culture, finding the right topic that can increase their interest according to their age and their original culture. I don’t like them to think that grammar is boring, because it is through grammar that we express our ideas and our culture. I do believe that starting with an interesting topic is the best way to connect a specific grammar issue which can help them to talk about culture. For example, while we were studying the unit Viaggiare in Italia (Travelling in Italy)learning vocabulary about travel and discovering the geography of Italy, my students used to forms of grammar to express their ideas about travelling. They used the past tense to describe a travel they already had, and the conditional as well as the if clause to describe a hypothetical travel they wish to have. Without learning the language they cannot go as deep as they would like to go into the Italian culture, they cannot truly understand nor express their knowledge about it. It is their own interest, elicited through the right stimulus, which leads them spontaneously to grammar, since they want to have the means to reveal what they know about Italy. That’s my best goal as well as my biggest satisfaction. This is my teaching philosophy then: great Italian teaching combines the perfect balance between culture and grammar, the right time and the right inputs to let students spontaneously love Italian culture and language, and the teacher’s responsibility of being, always and anyways, the endorser of his/her own culture.